I'm taking a blogging class at LVS Online Classes. The classes I have taken there so far have been very good, and the class price is quite reasonable - $25.00 for a six-week class.

One of the students in the class said she was making her blog into a book. I checked out the website, blurb.com. Blurb.com has special software, Blurb Booksmart, that you can download for free. This software gives you page templates for your book. It also has a "slurping" feature. It can go to your blog and download all your posts into the book template. Then you can go back through each page, changing the layout, adding or deleting pages. It only took a couple of minutes. I decided to make a book of all my posts from 2008. I just deleted the pages with 2009 posts.

Although the slurp will work for Blogger, Wordpress.com, Typepad and other site hosted blogs, it doesn't work with self-hosted blogs. I have a self-hosted Wordpress.org blog, but I also have a Blogger account. I was able to export my blog to Blogger using this site. It was very quick, and I didn't have any problems with it. Doing the import does not affect your original blog at all. My post stylings such as post title color and font were not imported, but you can change that in the book template. I set my Blogger blog to private, so I wouldn't have duplicate published blogs.

After downloading (or "slurping") my blog into Booksmart, you can edit the pages. The photos on my blog are low resolution. These will not print well. (The little yellow and red triangle on the photo below is warning me about this.) Exchanging the photos for high resolution copies stored on my computer, styling the fonts, and designing a cover will be a nice summer project. Blurb.com will print your finished book, and their prices seem very reasonable. They have examples of finished books on their site here.

There are so many book possibilities in addition making your blog into a book. Artists can do a photo book of their work; a scrapbook of highlights in a child's life can be given as a going-off-to-college gift; and cookbooks of your favorite recipes can be easily made. The drop-and-drag quality of the software makes it easy to add photos. When you have printed your book, you can sell copies of it in the blurb.com bookstore.